Foundational Criticism by Peter Nicholls (review)

Reviewed by: Foundational Criticismby Peter Nicholls Andrew M. Butler Foundational Criticism. Peter Nicholls. Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years. Reading: Ansible, 2022. 415 pp. 22. 50/£18 pbk, £5. 50 ebk. End Page 119 Our understanding of sf owes much to Peter Nicholls. For several decades he was arguably most prominent as a citation or as part of one for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979, 1993, 2011, 2021), which guided us through pretty well every sf novelist, film, and television series (minus Octavia E. Butler in the first edition), alongside a large number of themes for further study. In its book forms, its (temperamental) CD-ROMs and its constantly updated webpage, the Encyclopediahas been and should remain an invaluable reference. Nicholls had moved to London in 1970 from Melbourne, soon becoming the first administrator of the Science Fiction Foundation at the then North East London Polytechnic, a role he played until his work on the Encyclopediatook over in 1978. He was the second editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fictionfrom 1974 to 1978. He organized a series of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1975, featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, Edward de Bono, John Taylor, John Brunner, Harry Harrison, Alvin Toffler, Alan Garner, Thomas M. Disch, and Nicholls himself, plus Robert Sheckley, who replaced Philip K. Dick. These talks were collected as Science Fiction at Large (1976). He also wrote The Science in Science Fiction (1982, with David Langford and Brian Stableford) and Fantastic Cinema (1984), before returning to Melbourne in 1988. There is a risk that such an important figure would be forgotten—in the Encyclopediahidden behind the initials PN, in dusty obsolete guides in academic libraries, or in reviews in journals, newspapers, and fanzines available only to the most intrepid researcher. In 2012, Nicholls decided to select some of this material for a collection, Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years: A Collection of Commentaries and Reviews, but this remained incomplete at his death in 2018. David Langford has completed this editing and made the collection available as part of Ansible Editions. The book brings together around thirty reviews, a number of articles—mostly from Foundation—several profiles, four write-ups on conventions, and talks, including the one from Science Fiction at Large, "Science Fiction: The Monsters and the Critics. " Nicholls tells us, in "Tolkien: Anatomy of a Romance" Vector67/68, 1974, reprinted here that he first read The Lord of the Ringsin 1954, went through a period of being critical of it for its prose, its songs, and Tolkien's treatment of women, but after Tolkien's death he admitted that there was something to the books, despite acknowledging their flaws; it was inevitable that Nicholls would borrow the subtitle of Tolkien's 1936 lecture on Beowulffor his ICA talk. The reviews provide the meat of the book, from Lem's Solaris (1961, trans. 1970), "a novel more notional than realized" (18) to Damien Broderick's collection Earth Is But a Star (2001). It is also worth noting his description of "celebrated critic John Clute who, when in obscurantist mode … is magisterially opaque" (395). The bulk of the novels reviewed are from the 1970s and early 1980s, the Foundationyears and beyond. It would be tempting to take a lot of these as evidence that Nicholls actually hates science fiction, but the approach is similar to that of Clute and M. John Harrison in their reviews of that era: he fears that too many authors retread old ground, that End Page 120literary value cannot be located in them, and that the authors are not thinking through their ideas sufficiently. Nicholls criticizes sf precisely becausehe loves it. In the volume's introduction, he writes "I haven't stuck with science fiction all these years still wanting from it exactly what I required when I was sixteen" (171), guarding against the sentimental nostalgia of his adolescent reading experiences. The veteran male writers reviewed here include Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Wolfe. The critique of Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973) is headed "Heinlein—A Lazarus Too Long? " (1975), which sets. . .